NC v. David Prevatte

David Wesley Prevatte is on trial in Pender County Superior Court in Burgaw, North Carolina, charged with first-degree murder and related charges in the November 2017 death of his five-year-old niece. By his own public account he was in the house that morning. He says he found her unresponsive, performed CPR, and that he and his father took her to the hospital. She died three days later. In a 2018 jailhouse interview he said, again and again, that he had nothing to do with it. He is presumed innocent, and the State alone carries the burden of proving otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Pender County Sheriff's Office named him a suspect in June 2018, when he was nineteen. He was not charged in her death until February 2022, more than four years after she died, and the State has never said publicly what changed in between. That same summer of 2018, her mother, his own sister, said publicly that there was no way her brother did this and that the detective had it out for him. That is the gap this trial lives inside: whether the evidence places him in that room, or whether investigators fixed on a nineteen-year-old early and never let go.

Jury selection began on September 28, and a jury of twelve was reported seated the next day. Opening statements are expected on Wednesday, September 30. We are not here to convict David Prevatte and we are not here to acquit him. We are here to watch whether the State can close a gap it has carried since 2018, in front of twelve people asked to answer the question for good. Start with the background report below, then follow every day of trial with us.

Coverage begins the day proceedings do. Start with the background above.